Printing from the iPad

The secret to printing from the iPad has been revealed. [PC World] Thanks, Arkizzle!

• [mudpup]

  Couldn’t resist, after seeing this all over the net yesterday I had to try it this morning. Didn’t work got a black page, network printing works much better. 

• [tim]

  It’s *still* less hassle than getting printing to work on windows.

  • [oheso]

    yer doin it rong

• [theLadyfingers]

  Somewhat amusingly, this WOULD work on a Kindle, but is already has printing functionality as far as I know.

• [friendpuppy]

  Does anybody think maybe, maybe, the bluetooth might be for printing?? Maybe?

• [Anonymous]

  Be prepared for Apple to “improve” all future revisions of the iPad with a new coating on the glass that is only revealed by exposure to bright light such as that from a scanner or Xerox machine. Much like your bank checks, it will scramble your screen with a jumble of Apple logos and DO NOT COPY text. You think I’m kidding, but they will consider it – for your own good, of course.

• [Anonymous]

  I’ve been trying to paid my bluetooth ear peaces to my iPad & iPod touch, without any success. Still wondering what the bluetooth actually does on these iThings.

• [Stooge]

  friendpuppy, there’s no place for that kind of perfectly reasonable assumption here: we’re talking about Apple.

• [thequickbrownfox]

  thanx for the news.

• [arikol]

  ..or printing over wi-fi? (router with a print server, like an Airport Extreme)

  Although Apple can be somewhat infuriating with their limitations.

• [Daemon]

  If Apple was the sort of company to make sense, their hardcore users wouldn’t have to froth at the mouth every time somebody points out the obvious flaws.

• [Anonymous]

  I suspected that would be the case when I saw the headline, and the source…

  I fully respect that Apple is making a calculated move that tighter control of content means a more uniform user experience, and that options exist to be accidentally set to infuriating settings, and I can even accept that, while the world is not paperless, I probably print less than I used to, and they were right about the whole iMac floppy drive thing, and with no keyboard it is better for absorbing material than creating it. But really?

  I can only think of when you’re in line at a movie theater, and watch everyone doing the rope maze, until you say to hell with it and unbuckle them. If the best way to get a digital file out of a digital device to a digital printer is to take a picture of the screen, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. Apple, not this chap, whose hacker spirit is clearly in the right place.

• [peterbruells]

  What is this „printing“ you are talking about?

  SCNR.

  Anyway, I can see that many people would like that option, but I honestly do not know when I printed something outside my work.

  • [Cheqyr]

    You’re not a writer, are you? For my various writing/reading groups — whose members employ widely varied technologies — I’m constantly printing stuff out. That’s commonly how we communicate our feedback to each other: marked-up hardcopy.

    • [peterbruells]

      Nope. And if I were, I wouldn’t use the iPad as a tool for serious writing.

      But I probably wouldn’t print it out anyway – I prefer annotated PDFs and the likes and it makes me gnaw the table when colleagues pass paper copies around, asking for handwritten comments. Afterwards, they gnaw the table because they can’t decipher my handwriting. :)

• [Anonymous]

  If Apple was the sort of company to make sense, the world wouldn’t go beserk over ‘breakthrough’ features like printing and using bluetooth keyboards. Give me a damn break already!! Apple says “Our product will now let you send text over wires” and everybody reacts “Apple is just amazing, what will they think of next!?”

• [egp]

  I have actually printed from my iPad, via wifi. HP has an iPhone app, called iPrint Photo. It lets you send images over wifi to an HP inkjet printer. iPrint works on iPad.

  Since I can take a screenshot with the iPad by pressing the home and power buttons at the same time (in just the way it works on the iPhone), I can capture any screen view as a .png file which the iPad puts into my Photos app. From there, I can send it to my HP printer.

  Images on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/egp/4536999174/

  No, it’s not perfect. I haven’t been able to get the HP software to print an 8.5 x 11 image – the largest size I can get is 5 x 7. And .pdfs are fuzzy when printed from a screenshot, so I don’t have an elegant way to print from Pages – yet. Still, it’s a start.

• [Jerril]

  All the connection protocol don’t help if there’s no drivers and your apps don’t have a print button or menu option or flick sequence.

  And you cant ADD programs with a print button, or drivers, because it’s an iPad.

• [flojomojo]

  What a bunch of nerds. If you’re printing from iPad, you’re doing it wrong.

  Neither my mobile phone nor my refrigerator nor my car not my bicycle can print, either.

  One of the comments says:

  “Even my Playstation 3 can print to my network printer. How is it that the iPad is missing such a basic functionality?”

  How would a DEDICATED GAME CONSOLE even USE a print function?

  • [dejaffa]

    Flojomojo, while I agree with you that printing from a dedicated game console is kind of lame, I bet it’s used for printing screenshots.

  • [Agies]

    Up until the most recent firmware update you could run Linux on a PS3.

    The reason people want to print on their iPad vs printing on their phone is because of perceptions of where the device has positioned itself in the marketplace. If it is meant to largely replace a netbook as a device to interface with the web and do light work then it’s not unreasonable to expect it to be able to print out documents and web pages. I suspect Jobs and Apple want people to think of it as something more akin to a TV where content is consumed rather than created.

• [franko]

  there actually already is an app for this.